Zika Virus News: Google Assigns Engineers To Map Disease Future Path

Google is providing support to combat Zika in Brazil and around the world. The company’s philanthropic organization, announced plans to help and team up with UNICEF and other organizations to fight the disease that’s rapidly spreading across the U.S. and other countries. “A volunteer team of Google engineers, designers, and data scientists is helping UNICEF build…

Google’s parent company Alphabet has put on hold a project to build glucose-sensing contact lens for people living with diabetes due to unsatisfactory results from clinical work.

The aim of the project was to turn contact lens into a cutting-edge medical device that could measure blood glucose levels through detection of glucose level in tears.

For the project Google’s health-tech arm Verily entered into a partnership with Alcon, Novartis’ eye-care division, in 2014.

“Our clinical work on the glucose-sensing lens demonstrated that there was insufficient consistency in our measurements of the correlation between tear glucose and blood glucose concentrations to support the requirements of a medical device,” Brian Otis, Chief Technical Officer at Verily, wrote in a blog post on Friday.

In part, this was associated with the challenges of obtaining reliable tear glucose readings in the complex on-eye environment.

A Google logo is seen at the company’s headquarters in Mountain View, California, VOA

“For example, we found that interference from biomolecules in tears resulted in challenges in obtaining accurate glucose readings from the small quantities of glucose in the tear film.